Between Here and Here by Amy Bloom

Author:Amy Bloom [Bloom, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60408-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

I rang the doorbell and my father let me in. Aside from needing a haircut, he looked good. The house did not. And it smelled the way it had forty years ago, when our whole family sat on the kitchen porch and watched Long Island Sound rise past the pear tree and onto the driveway and then into the TV room, which had never really recovered.

“Better late than never,” he said. “The girl left a note for you.”

The note said, as I knew it would, that Delphine found herself too busy to clean for my father, and it was her distinct impression that he actually needed more than a cleaning person since, as she wrote in her neat, curvy handwriting, there was an exceptional amount of filth and personal uncleanliness accumulating from week to week (she itemized the most offensive occurrences at the bottom of the page). She was happy to recommend Beate Jaszulski, a Polish person who had been a nurse in Poland and whom she had met at adult education. She left me Beate’s number. My father and I ate the only things in the refrigerator, hard-boiled eggs and American cheese, and he asked why Andy hadn’t come. I said Andy was very busy, and my father snorted.

“Busy sucking some guy’s cock,” my father said.

“You know,” I said conversationally, “we try to be nice to you. We try to be nice, which isn’t easy because you are an emotional black hole and the coldest, most self-centered sonofabitch I have ever known, we try to be nice in honor of our mother’s memory. So, if you can’t be civil, why don’t you just shut the fuck up?”

My father took his slice of cheese into the living room and read until he heard me go to bed.

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